by Hazel Hughes
“Sebastian? Seb?” It was Naomi. “Are you up there?”
Elizabeth made a split-second decision. She turned and ran to the door, pulling it open and running down the hall to the elevator. She pressed the button, her pulse still racing. She glanced down the hallway. Back in her room, lying on her bed, she wondered what had just happened. She traced the path Sebastian had licked along her jaw and shivered. She hadn’t felt like this since ... she couldn’t remember. Definitely before Steve. Steve’s face popped into her mind, not as it was now, puffy and jowly, but the way he had looked when they first met. Sweet and boyish, a quiet intelligence dancing in his gray eyes. Elizabeth felt a throb of guilt that propelled her off the bed.
She walked over to the mirror above the bureau and stared at her reflection. It hadn’t changed. She was still the same. “You have nothing to feel guilty about,” she told herself, searching her face for whatever had compelled Sebastian to come on to her. She wasn’t ugly, she knew, but she was no Naomi Clamp.
As if thinking of Naomi had conjured her, Elizabeth heard her high-pitched giggle out in the hallway. She tip-toed to the door and pressed her ear against it, listening.
“Sebastian, what are you doing?”
It was Naomi. Right outside her door.
“Shh.” That was Sebastian. The sound of his voice bumped Elizabeth’s heart rate up a few notches.
She heard scratching noises, and then Naomi. “Come on, Seb. I want to go. Now.” She giggled again. The tone of her voice, breathy and almost whining, made it clear exactly where she wanted to go.
“Oh, yeah?” She heard Sebastian say. Then not quite silence. Muffled sounds. Breathing. They were kissing, Elizabeth realized, feeling a hot arrow of jealousy shoot through her chest. She pressed herself against the wall, feeling the jealously shift to anger. She wanted to stomp away from the door, but if she did, they would hear the click of her heels on the hardwood floor.
Naomi laughed again, low and throaty. Then Elizabeth heard another sound, the soft shoop of a piece of paper sliding under the door.
“What was that about?” It was Naomi’s voice, but fainter. They were walking away. Elizabeth crouched down to pick up the paper, straining to hear Sebastian’s reply.
“Just a question about Michel,” she thought she heard him say.
The note was written on a piece of hotel stationery, folded in half. She opened it. Written in a tiny, tight scrawl, it said, “I’ll be thinking of you.”
*
Elizabeth didn’t sleep well that night, even after a long, steamy shower in which she used nearly all of the Keihl’s body wash the hotel provided. She couldn’t stop thinking about Sebastian.
Finally, at 6:00, after tossing and turning and dozing fitfully for hours, she gave up and got up, pulling on her sports bra and stretch pants. She corralled her hair into a loose ponytail, slipped on a fleece and her Nikes, and left the room.
The Equinox gym was just around the corner. Elizabeth had debated going for a run outside but decided that getting lost on the streets of New York at dawn wouldn’t be the best way to start the day. She gave the unnervingly perky girl at the reception desk her room key.
“Thanks, Elizabeth,” she said, swiping the card then handing it back to her with a plush towel. “There’s a Kickspyo class starting in a few minutes if you’re interested.”
“A what?” Elizabeth asked.
“Oh, you’ve never done Kickspyo? It’s a combination of kick-boxing, spinning and yoga. It’s amaaazing for your core,” the receptionist enthused, lifting up her shirt to reveal a fat-free six pack. Elizabeth unconsciously put her hand on her own slim but toneless stomach.
“Maybe next time,” she smiled, taking her towel into the gym. “I just want to run.” She glanced through the window of the studio as she passed it. The people standing around inside chatting casually and stretching were a mix of ages, ethnicities and genders, but they were all ripped and groomed and their gym clothes looked like they cost more than Elizabeth’s car.
Elizabeth found an empty treadmill and, after fiddling with the touch screen for a few minutes, managed to get it started. Straddling the moving belt, she tucked her earphones in and cued up her Ass-Kickin’ Playlist, the one she made for those days when her laptop translated everything she wrote into Cyrillic, Gwen decided she was never wearing shoes again and Keenan said “shit” to his grandma at breakfast.
As Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” pounded in her ears, Elizabeth decided to dispense with a warm up and started running, as fast and as hard as she could, until her heart felt like it was going to rip out of her chest. By the time she had reached “Nothing Else Matters,” her cool down song, she really felt like nothing did. Red-faced and dripping sweat, she headed for the weights.
She had just picked up two ten-pound free weights when she felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned to see Sebastian in a black t-shirt and running shorts, his muscular thighs and biceps on display.
“Oh, hi,” she said, glad that she was already red and breathless from running. “You’re up early.” She faced the mirror and started to do hammer curls, avoiding his eyes in the reflection, trying to concentrate on her form.
“Yeah. I didn’t sleep much.”
“I bet.” She brought the weight up, slowly, contracting her bicep. She had nice arms, Steve always told her. They were the one part of her body she was completely happy with.
Sebastian laughed. A half-embarrassed chuckle. Elizabeth glanced up at his reflection. He was looking at the floor, biting his lower lip.
“Did you get my note?” He looked up, suddenly, catching her eyes in the mirror. She couldn’t look away.
“Yeah, I got it. So?” She felt anger blooming like the yeast flowers in her sourdough starter, but she kept a nonchalant smile on her face. Sebastian didn’t need to know that she cared.
“So. I was. Thinking about you.” He traced his finger along her jaw where he had licked her. “All night.” His eyes held hers in the mirror. She nearly dropped the weights.
“You know,” she said, hastily putting the dumbbells back in their places, “I don’t think I’m up for this today. I’ll see you on set.” She started to walk toward the change room, but Sebastian grabbed her wrist.
“Hey. They aren’t shooting my scene until two. I thought I’d check out what’s on at MOMA. Come with me.”
“I’d better not,” Elizabeth said. Her wrist, with Sebastian’s warm fingers wrapped around it, felt more alive than the rest of her body, somehow.
He let her go. “Oh, right. They need you on set,” he smirked.
She laughed, rubbing her wrist. “Mean!” she said.
He smiled at her, that knowing smile, those incredibly long eyelashes.
She started walking away. “Actually, I’m meeting my agent for lunch, so...”she said, over her shoulder.
“Right, another time,” he said.
“Right.”
This time, she took a cold shower.
*
As Elizabeth stepped out onto the street, the brisk wind hit her like a slap. It was one of those gray March days that felt more like January, the sky low, a promise of snow in the air. She wrapped her scarf around her neck, wishing she had taken the time to blow-dry her hair. Fortunately, the hotel wasn’t far. She was heading toward it when she saw something out of the corner of her eye that stopped her. It was Sebastian. Wearing a navy pea-coat and jeans, a toque pulled down over his crew cut, he was crouched down beside a homeless man, talking to him and petting his dog, a yellow mutt that looked cleaner and better fed than its owner. Elizabeth stood and stared, transfixed. Sebastian shook the man’s hand, laughing and stood up. He gave the dog one last pat and slung his gym bag over his shoulder, walking away in the opposite direction of the hotel. As if she was being pulled by a magnet, Elizabeth found herself being drawn after him.
As she passed the homeless man, she glanced down at him. He was holding up a bill and talking to his dog. “That’s a hundred. Is that a
hundred? That’s a hundred.”
Elizabeth told herself she was not following Sebastian, she was just going for a stroll in what happened to be the same direction. The wind swirled around her, and she pulled up the collar of her coat, shrinking into her scarf. She could feel her hair starting to freeze. Sebastian was about twenty feet ahead of her. She saw his toque-covered head bobbing in the crowd. He had put on sunglasses.
Suddenly he wasn’t there anymore. Elizabeth stopped, standing on tiptoe and craning her neck. She walked to the end of the block, searching for him. Nothing. He was gone. She walked slowly back toward the hotel, glancing idly in the shops as she did. A bakery. A cafe. An upmarket sex shop. A bookstore. Small, independently owned, the kind you only ever saw in small towns or cities like New York, where there was a niche for everything. I wonder if they have my book, she thought.
She had her hand on the door and was about to go in when she spotted Sebastian inside. He was at the cashier, buying something. Elizabeth let go of the handle and huddled further down into her scarf. She walked past the store, glancing up momentarily as she passed Sebastian. He didn’t notice her. But Elizabeth recognized the book he was buying. It was Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.
*
“Have you ever been in a situation where you know, intellectually, that something is wrong, that you’re going to regret it if you do it, but do it anyway?” Elizabeth was sitting across from Abbie, a steaming bowl of pho in front of her, its anise-infused fragrance better than aromatherapy. Because of the unseasonable cold, they had decided to pass on the sandwich place below Abbie’s office and were squeezed into a cramped noodle shop, diphthongs flying all around them as the denizens of Chinatown gobbled down their lunches.
“Only every time I walk down 6th,” Abbie groaned, putting down her chopsticks and resting her chin in her hands. “There’s this amazing bakery. Their key-lime cupcakes are tiny, paper-wrapped bites of heaven,” she said dreamily, “And their cider doughnuts, oh ...” she gazed off into the middle distance for a moment. Then snapped her eyes back to Elizabeth. “Wait a minute. This isn’t about Sebastian Faulkner is it?” She narrowed her eyes suspiciously.
Elizabeth looked back at Abbie with her best impersonation of wide-eyed innocence. “No,” she said, trapping a clot of noodles in her chopsticks.
“Lizzie,” Abbie wailed. “What are you doing? After what I told you?”
“Nothing.” Clearly, she’d have to work on that innocent look.
“Uh-huh,” Abbie said, crossing her chubby arms and leaning back in her chair. “That’s why you just nodded and smiled at me when I showed you my edits. You didn’t hear a word I said. You were fantasizing about Mr. AWOL.” Abbie struck a manly pose, glowering in a remarkable caricature of the ad for Sebastian’s TV show.
Elizabeth laughed, nearly choking on her soup. “No, no. I’m serious. Nothing has happened. Really. It was a strictly hypothetical question.” She ran her hand along her jaw.
“Good,” Abbie said, returning her attention to her noodles. “Because nothing positive could come of it. You’d just be opening yourself up to a whole world of pain. And my quota of suffering artistes is already filled.” She squeezed some garlic-chili sauce into her bowl. “Besides, you’ve got it good, sweetie. A husband with a good job who lets his wife stay home and write? Two gorgeous kids? You don’t want to mess that up.”
“Of course not,” Elizabeth said, with a pang of guilt, realizing she hadn’t thought about her kids in almost twenty-four hours. They’d just be finishing up at school for the day. She should call them when she got back to the hotel, she thought.
“Oh, that reminds me. I got the final contract from Cullen. I wasn’t sure if he’d go for it but he signed off on giving you five percent of the profits.”
“So, if it makes, say, a million dollars,” Elizabeth squinted, trying to visualize the numbers – she’d always been terrible at math – “that means I get ...”
“Fifty thousand. Well, minus my twenty-five percent.” Abbie slid another contract across the table. “So, about thirty-seven five.”
Elizabeth signed them both and passed them back to Abbie. “That’s not bad.”
Abbie grinned back at her, a jack-o-lantern smile splitting her round face. “No, that’s not bad, considering The Big O made two million and Dirty Girls has made almost twenty-five million so far.”
“Oh my God!” Elizabeth shrieked, grabbing Abbie’s hands.
“I know!” Abbie squealed. “Never mind what it’s going to do for your book sales!”
*
Elizabeth started back to the Mercer with dollar signs floating in her head. Could it be that her years of hard work were actually going to pay off? She got off the subway at Spring and strolled along the busy street, looking in all the shop windows with renewed interest. In theory, she could afford to buy something in one of them. Normally, Banana Republic was as high-end as she got, even after Steve’s promotion. It just didn’t feel right, spending their money on her. But now she had some money of her own.
Elizabeth read the signs over the shops. Lalique, Kiki de Montparnasse – even their names sounded like jewels. She stopped in front of one, a lingerie store. Faceless black velvet mannequins in translucent lace adorned the windows. On a whim, she went inside.
“May I help you?” A woman looked up from her computer as Elizabeth entered. Middle-aged, but with a lot of help, she guessed from the sound of the woman’s voice.
“No, I’m just looking.”
The woman gave Elizabeth a subtle once-over, concluding, Elizabeth guessed, that she wouldn’t be dropping much cash. “Let me know if you need anything,” she said, eyes already back on the screen.
“Uh-huh.” Elizabeth picked a bra off the rack. It was pale peach satin with black lace trim. Elizabeth thought about the plain black bra and panties she was wearing, the cotton so faded it was almost gray. She looked at the price and had to stop herself gasping. One hundred and fifteen dollars for a bra. She picked up the matching panties. Forty-nine fifty. Elizabeth had grudgingly paid seven dollars a pair for what she considered her good panties, the ones with the elastic lace she had gotten at Victoria’s Secret. Reflexively, she started to put the lingerie back, but a sudden impulse stopped her. She turned to the woman at the computer.
“I’d like to try these,” she said.
*
Back in her room at the Mercer, she carefully pulled her purchases out of their tissue nests and laid them on the bed. She had spent a thousand dollars on lingerie, she realized, with a thrill. She stripped out of her clothes and slipped on a pair of black lace panties, cut high on the cheeks. Cheekies, the woman at the store had called them. Elizabeth examined her rear view in the mirror and smiled, remembering what her mother had jokingly said to jolly Elizabeth out of her morbid teenaged body obsession: “When they were handing out breasts, you thought they said tests and said, ‘No thanks.’ But when they were handing out bums, you thought they said plums and said, ‘Oh, yes, the more the better.’ Years of experience with men hadn’t exactly made her love her curvy butt or her small breasts, but she had at least come to accept them.
She hooked the matching bra on and struck a Heidi Klum pose, looking in the mirror. It was a definite improvement, she thought, pitching her old panties at the garbage bin. Elizabeth rifled through the drawers, picking out all the disreputable undies and replacing them with her new purchases.
She had just pulled on her jeans and turtleneck when her phone trilled. She answered it as she grabbed her laptop and walked out the door. It was Emily.
“Hey, you,” she said in her deep purr. “How’s the Big Apple?”
“Do they still call it that, Grandma Em?” Elizabeth teased, walking down the hall to the elevator.
“Whatever. I saw Keenan and Gwen at the school with your mom.”
“Oh, how did they look?” Elizabeth felt that guilty twinge again. She’d call them from the set.
“Totally fine. Don’t worry. But how are y
ou doing? Drew, Avery, would you guys stop teasing the dog? I swear one day he’s going to bite you and then we’ll spend the night at the emergency room and you’ll miss Ben Ten.”
Elizabeth stifled a laugh.
“Sorry,” Emily apologized.
“Don’t worry about it. I’m Keenan’s mom, remember?” Elizabeth said, watching the numbers above the elevator light up. She lowered her voice. “I just spent a thousand bucks on underwear.”
Emily inhaled sharply. “Elizabeth! I knew it. You are having an affair.”
“What? No. Why would you say that?” Elizabeth tugged at the neck of her sweater, feeling too warm all of a sudden.
“Come on,” Emily said, “a thousand bucks on underwear? Remember that show I did on cheating? I had that doctor on who wrote Women Who Stray and the Men Who Love Them? A man called in, suspecting his wife was having an affair. He wanted to know how he could tell. She said, oh what was her name? Dr. Berry? She told him to look in her lingerie drawer. If there were any secret sexy wisps of lace hidden under the sturdy cotton granny pants ... bingo!”
“Oh, please, Em. I am not cheating. I bought them for me.”
“Uh-huh,” Emily said, not convinced.
“I haven’t felt sexy since before Keenan was born.” She ran a hand over her sweater, beneath which she knew was the delicate ribbon of a strap. “Nobody can see them, but they give me a little lift. Pun intended.” It was true, she realized. She felt the same thrill of power that she got when she wore her snakeskin stilettos. “Besides, Steve will get to see them when I get home, I guess.” The thought made Elizabeth frown.
“Oh, I get it,” Emily said. “Trying to spice things up in the boudoir.”
“Something like that.” Elizabeth laughed. “I’m bringing sexy back.”
